Barrow-in-Furness Karate

Do you live in or around Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, England?

Shoshin Karate Club is looking for new members who are interested in learning Karate. Please leave a comment here if or email stephen dot irwin at bt internet dot com for details.

There's no training on Monday 31st August (Bank Holiday Monday). Training on Thursday 3rd September begins at 6:30pm, and after that we should be back to normal hours.

Every Monday and Thursday
Juniors from 6:30pm (ages 6 - 12)
Seniors from 7:20opm (ages 13+)

Greengate Junior School
Greengate Street
Barrow-in-Furness

More info: http://barrow-karate.blogspot.com

Training and Conditioning: Abs and Core Muscles

Here's some more training articles focusing on core strength training and abdominal workouts...

http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/abdominal.html

http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/abdominalcorestrength1/a/NewCore.htm

The second link has plenty of further links for you to research.

Training and Conditioning: Sit-ups

Here's another a posting on conditioning training. This time we'll take a look at sit-ups. There's a good video on Youtube on the subject, try this:




How about going for a Two Hundred sit-ups challenge? There's a website here if you're interested in that! http://www.twohundredsitups.com/ Just remember to have a specific target for your exercise, don't simply exercise for the sake of being good at doing sit-ups!

The US army has a minimum sit-up requirement for different age groups enlisting. Check out their chart at http://www.army.com/enlist/sit-ups.html It's probably a good first target to aim to complete the minimum requirement for your age if you haven't done sit-ups before. (Actually those charts are pretty useful, check out the push-ups chart too!)

There are other charts for the British Army if you wish to study those. They can be found at:
http://www.hmforces.co.uk/content/Army_basic_training

What's happening?

Hello!

Still here, haven't gone away... I've been enjoying some summer training (keeps me out of the rain!!!) Classes are continuing during the holidays and we're doing OK with numbers. We have one or two very dedicated students and they are the ones who make it all worthwhile. (You know who you are, I won't mention names, and one of you will probably blush if I did ;) )

I've been playing with some sticks with a couple of the lads, and we're having great fun with that. We're using escrima sticks because they are convenient and using them with kata "bunkai" has been very interesting (I'll post some info soon). Plus the circular flowing movements of the stick work are very beneficial for our karate.

Also coming up will be some more information on conditioning.... sit-ups, core training and some traditional methods for conditioning which you might find useful.